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posted by n1 on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-not-reply-to-this-email dept.

Slate published a story about a university professor who got fed up with her students' e-mailing habits:

A Salem College faculty member last semester took an uncompromising approach to curbing syllabus and inbox bloat: Why not ban most student emails?

“For years, student emails have been an assault on professors, sometimes with inappropriate informality, sometimes just simply not understanding that professors should not have to respond immediately,” Spring-Serenity Duvall, assistant professor of communications at Salem College, wrote in a blog post last week. “In a fit of self-preservation, I decided: no more. This is where I make my stand!”

Duvall’s frustration is shared by many in academe—or anyone with an email account—from faculty members beset by questions they have answered both in class and in writing to students inundated by university email blasts. This spring, when Duvall taught at the University of South Carolina–Aiken, she adopted a new email policy to cut down on emails from students telling her they would be late, or would miss class, or would have to leave early, or any of the countless others that could be handled face to face.

The story goes on to describe the success she had in imposing this restriction.

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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:38AM

    by arslan (3462) on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:38AM (#94832)

    Students probably don't understand how much email profs get. They think it probably looks like their campus mailbox. Some things are better discussed face to face.

    OTOH, if you're gonna be late or miss class, you can't really do that face-to-face...

    • (Score: 1) by art guerrilla on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:58PM

      by art guerrilla (3082) on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:58PM (#95195)

      1. IF she's getting THAT much email, maybe she isn't communicating her lectures/etc clearly enough...
      2. um, isn't that THE essential part of her job: COMMUNICATING with students ? ? ?
      3. i understand there are *Some* things better communicated in person, but THAT seems even more problematic: she would like it if EVERY ONE of those students who emailed showed up at her office instead ? ? ? that makes no sense...
      4. let's face it, email is a GREAT medium in a lot of ways, AND one reason why i like to use it, is so i have a RECORD of the transaction... 'oh crap, did they say 5% rate or 6%, i know they mentioned both, but i can't remember which...' if we had that exchange of info as a conversation, NOW i have to go back and bother them AGAIN, but if it was email, i just go look that up...
      5. shit, why not go whole hog, and simply dump your email account...

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:13AM (#94837)

    Professor of communication is trying to ... communicate, I guess.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:29AM

      by Bot (3902) on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:29AM (#94845) Journal

      Set up an automatic response detailing the situation, problem solved. Or at least this is how I'd expect somebody adept at communication to act.

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:44AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:44AM (#94897)

        Being adept at communication doesn't imply being adept at technology. He might not know that this is even possible, let alone how.

  • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:28AM

    by Geotti (1146) on Thursday September 18 2014, @08:28AM (#94844) Journal

    She should have just set up an autoresponder listing the cases, when she will respond.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:00AM (#94856)

    Let's see how she's gonna deal with 2000 people visiting her daily... After all an email is easy to ignore unlike a person.

    And the issue obviously is not the choice of comms channel but the content...

    • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:28AM

      by lhsi (711) on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:28AM (#94888) Journal

      Sending an email is a lot easier than visiting the office.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by efitton on Thursday September 18 2014, @11:02AM

      by efitton (1077) on Thursday September 18 2014, @11:02AM (#94909) Homepage

      Read the article. It has been tried and worked. There were more office visits but they were more productive. Students did the reading more closely. Class discussions worked better. She may have actually worked harder but both she and the students were happy with the results.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Common Joe on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:38AM

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:38AM (#94866) Journal

    My initial thought when I read the summary was "WTF?" As I read the full story, I came to realize it wasn't a ban on emails in so much as a "I wrote syllabus and assignment papers for a reason so read them!" (Warning: Rant ahead)

    One of my biggest complaints in the work force is lack of communication. No one writes anything down, no one picks up their phone, and no one answers email. If I was lucky, they'd partly answer an email: out of five questions, they'd only half answer the first question and ignore the other four. The worst offenders are never available face-to-face. At least this professor is actually available. I once had an engineering professor that refused to answer his door during official office hours. So, I sat down in the hallway and waited for him to open his door; I could hear him in his office. I figured his coffee had to go through him eventually. (The asshole still brushed me off when he did come out. This is one of many reasons I'm 100% "for education" but 95% "against schools".)

    Longer story, but still on topic: One time at work, I was tasked to write a single button program that kicked off a batch process. They wanted no other features. (Don't ask why it wasn't triggered by another process or a timer. It still doesn't make sense to me after all these years.) At the initial meeting, I asked them how they would know when the batch process was done. [Insert uncomfortable silence from users.] I suggested a "red-yellow-green signal light" system that would indicate how far along in the process it was and where errors were occurring (if any). I delivered the program along with a 20 page document filled almost entirely with screen capture pictures. (In other words, not a long read.) After the first couple of pages, it was mostly a reference. I finished my program and about half a work day later, I got a phone call from one my users asking how to use my one button program. I went downstairs for a face-to-face (thankfully, they were close) and looked at the guy's desk. I pointed at my documentation and asked him if he looked at it. He said no and gave me this blank look that basically said "Why would I do that?". I then started pointing at the pictures in my documentation and the program on the screen explaining how the one button app should work. I had to go around and do that for several more members of the team. I don't know why I even bothered writing that damn documentation / reference material.

    TL;DR: We have a ton of tools, but people do not know how to communicate. The professor became a bottle neck to information flow because her students were too lazy to spend a few minutes to read what she had prepared. By forcing the work back on the students (where it should have been in the first place), her time was freed up to do other things like help students really in need. I have been the victim of the exact same thing in everyday work places as well.

    • (Score: 2) by E_NOENT on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:07AM

      by E_NOENT (630) on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:07AM (#94878) Journal

      I'm with you on workplace communication disorders.

      It's really frustrating--especially for a dev, who depends on some degree of precision in specifications--when people aren't participating or are otherwise unavailable. Most of the newer development methodologies seem aimed at addressing communication issues, for this precise reason. None of them seem to work ;)

      As for that professor, I'd just create a bug tracker (Mantis?) for the class. All communication goes through the tracker. Sick that day? Low priority. Dropping the class and you need me to sign the drop slip by Friday? Higher priority.

      Plus, it keeps everyone honest--I can't claim I "didn't get the email," nor can the student claim they "sent the email."

      --
      I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:48AM (#94899)

      I don't know why I even bothered writing that damn documentation / reference material.

      For the other members who didn't contact you.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:21PM (#94992)

        Do what I do.

        "Here is a copy of the docs. They tell you everything you need. If you have a specific question let me know." Attach the doc to the email.

        NEVER hear back. It is not my job to make sure you do yours.

        Thing is I understand why they do it. You can spend hours and hours reading stacks of docs. 99.999999% of it will never be used. Because many times the docs are filler to tick the checkbox for some process. So people only read them when someone says 'i put something you need in them'.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tempest on Thursday September 18 2014, @03:30PM

      by tempest (3050) on Thursday September 18 2014, @03:30PM (#95019)

      I learned a lesson at an early age about the importance of reading directions and comprehending them which has stuck with me all my days, but I've given up writing them for normal users.

      I've sent a user to a website with directions while on the phone with them, and they still ask me questions, requiring me to read what's on the screen. I'M LOOKING AT THE SAME DAMN TEXT. Fuck, I even included pictures. These days I only write directions with the intention of reminding myself how things are done, or in case I get hit by a bus and someone else with reading comprehension skills will pick them up. It makes things easier since you don't have to dumb down your writing so much.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hankwang on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:03PM

        by hankwang (100) on Thursday September 18 2014, @07:03PM (#95146) Homepage

        I've sent a user to a website with directions while on the phone with them, and they still ask me questions, requiring me to read what's on the screen. I'M LOOKING AT THE SAME DAMN TEXT.

        I don't know the specifics of this particular case, but UI design is much harder than a lot of techies seem to think it is. The plethora of nearly unusable and unfindable tools on our corporate intranet seems to prove it. Yes, some of them do have instructions (often only accessible after clicking a tiny link in a wall of text, leading to a 404 error page) but those instructions are only truly comprehensible if you understand the business process that is behind the page. Otherwise, it reads like "In order to do X, check if Y applies, then click Z" where X, Y, and Z are words with a very specific meaning that is not all that obvious to the casual user. The problem is that there are hundreds of intranet tools, each of which I use 3 times per year, and each of which has its own ideosyncrasies.

        Other example: if I need to troubleshoot network problems, I usually start examining the output of ifconfig (is the link up and do we have an IP address?) and nslookup (what nameserver is it using?), ping to a LAN IP address (are the network cables all connected?), ping to a WAN address (is the modem/router up?), etc. Not so difficult, is it? But if I have to go through these steps with my parents, over the phone, then it becomes clear that finding out the IP address and link state from the gibberish produced by ifconfig is really not that easy if you don't know what to look for. (For one thing, it's called "inet addr", not "IP address", in a line with lots of other IP-address-like things (Bcast, Mask)).

  • (Score: 1) by Username on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:56AM

    by Username (4557) on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:56AM (#94904)

    If I were her student I would notify her verbally and send an email.

    Had too many "Well, you didn't tell me" instances.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bziman on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:44PM

    by bziman (3577) on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:44PM (#94940)

    In my three years teaching at a major university, I struggled with trying to get my students to email me. Students would turn in work that indicated an obvious lack of understanding, and each week, I would beg them, if you don't understand, ask a question in class, come to my office hours, or send an email. It just didn't occur to them. I guess most of them had never had a professor who really cared about the success of each individual student like I did. They had been trained not to bug the professor and to muddle through on their own. The few students who got past that, and reached out to me, showed remarkable success.

  • (Score: 2) by Dale on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:37PM

    by Dale (539) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:37PM (#94959)

    Why would you need to email your professors saying you'd be late/absent? This isn't grade school or work. You are there or you aren't. If there is a valid reason to be late/absent AND there is a grade impact by the lateness/absence you can make your case when you see the professor. Aside from that what does it matter?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @10:36PM (#95253)

      Professors hear all kinds of excuses and most of them come after a due date. If you send an email to a professor two weeks before you are going to miss class (that ends up having a pop quiz), then you will have more success than the person that tells them after the fact.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:55PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:55PM (#94974)

    Students who are pestering their profs a lot often are exactly the ones who aren't taking the time to, you know, do the work and learn the material. I'm not saying that anyone who shows up to office hours is a bad student, I'm saying that if you show up and your question is, in a nutshell, "What's the minimum I have to know to pass this course?" you're a bad student. A good student is much more likely to show up with a question like "On page 15 of that article you assigned, I was confused about what they meant by ..." or "I've been working through this problem for hours, and I can't seem to get past this step right here.", both of which indicate that the student in question is making a good-faith effort to do their work.

    Professors who want to be nice to their students, particularly one who's charming but not particularly smart, will sometimes allow people who ask a lot of really stupid questions to slide through because they've tried so hard to pass. This is a bad idea, at any level, and it's how you end up with PhD's who don't have the slightest clue of what they're talking about in their field of supposed expertise (I've encountered these people, and they are truly sad cases).

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:58PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Thursday September 18 2014, @02:58PM (#95006)

    OK, I can understand the frustration of "being asked individually questions that were covered in class/in the materials by e-mail."

    Back when I was in college (and this was awhile ago), we had a simple fix. We had a newsgroup. (For kids these days, it's a forum, but older). You can let students ask EACH OTHER. You don't have to weigh in on every question - just the ones where you feel like you're adding something. In most classes I was in, students had no trouble telling each other what was well covered in the reading. And the TA's can handle most of what's more challenging than that.

    For things like absences, lateness, etc., have a policy - anything known in advance (more than a week out), you have to drop by and tell me. No excuses. Only e-mail if it's legitimately a late-breaking thing (and you better have a reason). Or, delegate the task of knowing about attendance to someone you trust (your TA's are a great resource here). Or, if it's a large class, just have an "absences" web page that students can access, and you can just get a summary print-out on class days. You can follow up if anyone's a chronic absentee or had a weak excuse.

    This shouldn't be a choice between "everything gets e-mailed to the professor" and "everything is asked in person of the professor." There are other approaches to solve the actual problem ("I get too many e-mails asking me to respond to each individual student about things I feel are low value for both of our time").

    • (Score: 1) by Pherenikos on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:08PM

      by Pherenikos (1113) on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:08PM (#95039)

      In my experience, these forums often devolve into homework answer repositories. The sad part is that many students then don't learn the material covered in the homework sets, and rely on the forum. The only way to then query their understanding of the material is at the midterms, which sadly isn't timely feedback.

    • (Score: 2) by TK on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:30PM

      by TK (2760) on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:30PM (#95216)

      I rarely used the class online forums because of how difficult it was to get handwritten equations there. I didn't have a scanner, and this was before I had a smartphone, so maybe it's easier to use for collaboration now.

      --
      The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
  • (Score: 2) by pendorbound on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:39PM

    by pendorbound (2688) on Thursday September 18 2014, @04:39PM (#95059) Homepage

    Can I just email in my “Drop” form?

    Definitely a prof I wouldn’t even consider taking a class from. I sincerely hope the college administration helps adjust his attitude.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18 2014, @09:07PM (#95202)

      My sister is a teacher for a remote class (college level). She showed me the emails she gets. *MANY* are borderline illiterate. The work she gets turned in many times fails the copy test. She showed me one where I was finally able to decipher that the girl would be late to class. She gets dozens of these a day.

      People think the prof is tied to their email. In my sisters case she also has a full time job as a lawyer and looks at it when she gets home for the day. Just like she tells them in the syllabus and in the first online session. Yet many fail to follow the simple instructions she gives.

      I sincerely hope the college administration helps adjust his attitude
      Why? They probably would back HER up. They are getting the same crap from the same students. They probably will let it go and see how it works out.

      Definitely a prof I wouldn’t even consider taking a class from
      She would not miss you.

      I highlighted something above to show you how you failed to read. Go back a re-read the summary and the story. You would see everyone did better because there was a better interaction.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @12:25AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @12:25AM (#95299)

        But that sort of situation is to be expected when 70% or more of the students in college-level courses are foreigners, often with little to no practical understanding of English, who are only there because they have wealthy parents who are willing and able to pay the much higher international student fees that college administrators find attractive. These students employ their third-world academic tactics of cheating, deception and bribery to try to get through the course without doing any actual work. As long as college administrators allow in students who are only there because of their financial situation, and not because of real academic abilities, then these sort of problems will be endemic to the college experience.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @07:29PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19 2014, @07:29PM (#95610)

          But that sort of situation is to be expected when 70% or more of the students in college-level courses are foreigners

          No these were not 'dem damn fergners'. These are people who graduated from American high schools. They were taking lawyer classes which usually mean having graduated at a bachelors level at least before being accepted. Cheating is rampant and being lazy is right behind it. I had left that behind long ago. 'in my day' if you wanted to properly cheat you joined a fraternity where they kept huge filing cabinets of previous tests and papers to use. Now you can do that all on the internet many times for free or small cost. After that first class I told my sister 'this is *all* yours good luck, my recommendation is give them Fs and if they bitch just tell them they are lucky you dont turn them in to the dean for cheating'. I didn't help anymore.

          This is basically children trying to figure out how to be adults. One thing they learn quickly is; no I do not camp out on my phone waiting breathlessly for you latest pronouncement of 'speech'. The parents failed to teach them simple things like manners and do what you say you are going to do. So they get to learn it the hard way just like my generation did.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by efitton on Friday September 19 2014, @03:04AM

      by efitton (1077) on Friday September 19 2014, @03:04AM (#95334) Homepage

      This is the kind of prof I would take a class from. Wants me to do the mandatory reading and then an actual class discussion and is actually available during office hours. Sounds good. Plus she was highly rated by the students who had her.

  • (Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Thursday September 18 2014, @05:54PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Thursday September 18 2014, @05:54PM (#95094)

    It seemed like the professor was banning students from using email at all. But no, just from emailing her... or him... its hard to know what to make of the name "Spring-Serenity".

    Nevermind, there is a "her" in the summary. On an unrelated note, I assume the name Serenity is popular among kids around 10 years old right now.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh